


take a moment, take a year

by stiction



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Episode Tag: Sleepless in Seattle, F/M, Insomnia, post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-21 23:39:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6062452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re not going to last, not with Alex so insistent on cutting the brake lines. The tightrope is swaying in the wind, the scales have tipped, the Magic 8 Ball reports the outcome hazy.</p><p>"Hey," she says. "Breathe."</p>
            </blockquote>





	take a moment, take a year

“I haven’t slept in three days,” Alex whispers. Her eyes are heavy; he can feel the way she looks at him with her hands gripping her paper cup of tea. It’s downright conspiratorial. Intimate. Too much for a Chicago coffeeshop, the sun setting through the window.

The tea is scalding hot, he knows--he put some ice in his earlier and it still burns his mouth--but he’s been watching her too, and she’s taken several long sips without flinching.

“Is that why you caught a red-eye to Chicago and broke into my office? Sleep deprivation?” he asks, trying to sound amused, trying to bring something other than defeat to her face.

She almost cracks a smile. Sips again, and Strand has a sudden pang of physical sympathy for how badly her mouth must hurt to drink like that.

“You didn’t answer any of my calls,” Alex says, after drinking, and drinking, and tapping her fingers on the smooth tabletop, and drinking again. Her foot scuffs the floor under the table and comes to rest against his, instep to instep. He doesn’t pull away. “Or Nic’s calls, or my emails, or Nic’s emails, or… God,  y’know, just. Send a girl a smoke signal, Dr. Strand.”

He doesn’t say anything--watches her watch him.

“I thought you were gone for good.”

She hasn’t broken eye contact. Something burns beneath the sleepless haze.

“So,” he says. “Three days?”

“I think I might have blacked out for a few minutes on the cab ride from the airport, but… Yeah.”

Her fingers tighten on her drink, a flinch half-borne, he imagines at will, of shame; it’s his own invention, she probably doesn’t feel ashamed at all, and yet the set of her shoulders is a scorned child’s.

“Nightmares?” Strand presses.

Alex’s lips thin. She shakes her head, meets his eyes again. “I haven’t gotten close enough to sleep to have nightmares.”

“Then… what?” He leans forward. His elbows land on the table and suddenly his hands in the proximity of her hands feel warm. The tea scalds, and Alex’s wan face bends under scrutiny. She doesn’t lean away, though, hardly blinks. The press of her foot against his is insistent, firm.

“I don’t know. I haven’t slept a full night through since… Well, it started while we were recording last season. The farther we got, the less and less I was able to sleep. And now it’s-it’s basically _impossible_.”

Alex shifts, takes a drink, and when she sets the cup down again the knuckle of her index finger touches his, a sharp point of contact, a completed circuit.

He doesn’t mention his junior year of undergrad, the six months of torture that found him sitting vigil late at night, staring out the window at the ceaseless Vancouver rain. He doesn’t mention how familiar the fire behind her eyes is to him, that he has spent a thousand restless hours at the inimitable boundary between sleeping and waking without being able to rouse himself or sink deeper into the fog.

He doesn’t ask her if she’s seen anything yet.

In the corners of her room. The darkness of the apartments across the street from her. Passing taxis and the next car over on the subway, her closet or the dripping laundry room, flickering in the bathroom mirror when she happens to glance for a second, just half a second stepping out of the shower.

It’s apparent enough.

He realizes with a start that his hand has found hers, his fingers gripping hers, hard.

Alex, he believes suddenly and without question, has seen many things in the dark.

“You should try to sleep,” Strand says, instead of anything he’s thinking.

“I should,” Alex agrees. It hangs. She squeezes his hand back, two sharp pulses.

His tea is still hot, but he grabs two plastic lids for their cups and they leave.

They take a quiet cab to her hotel room (he insists on seeing her there--her legs wobble when they rise from the table). He considers, while hailing the cab and helping her into the cab and following her in, inviting her to his apartment instead. It’s dark there, well insulated, no city lights flashing through the windows and casting shadows to keep her mind racing.

But he pictures the aftermath. If she sleeps, there will be the morning after, her mind still foggy. If she doesn’t sleep.

If she _doesn’t_ sleep, if _they_ don’t sleep, there will be the morning after. Foggy.

She gets out of the cab at the hotel, low-slung and modest on the edge of the city, and for a moment he thinks, that’s that. But she turns back, the door still open, and all of their bad blood is absent from the look.

He pays the driver and follows her out.

“Thank you,” Alex says, the door to her room beeping as it unlocks. “I understand if--if you want to go.”

“It’s alright,” Strand finds himself saying, following her in. Taking her coat. “Sometimes it helps. When someone’s there, I mean.”

Alex laughs a little, smooths the front of her cardigan where the cab ride has rumpled it. Strand hasn’t known her to be a fidgeter but now, in her space, bags under her eyes carefully disguised with makeup, she fiddles with the clock radio, puts her phone on to charge, digs out the toiletries packed haphazardly into an overnight bag and sets them up in the bathroom.

She fumbles a pill bottle and it rolls away from her outstretched fingers. He can’t help himself, doesn’t hold back on the urge to pick it up, to glance at the label.

“Sleeping pills?”

“Yeah,” Alex shrugs, but she flushes when she takes it from him. “A doctor prescribed them, I mean, I haven’t been taking them. They haven’t been working.”

“They rarely do,” he says, and there is relief in her smile.

“Do you want to-” she starts after a moment. “We could--I don’t know, watch a movie or something?”

They’ve been awkward before, especially in the earliest days, and yet the way she’s talking now is different. It’s Alex running on empty, no Nic, no recorder, no case as a buffer. It feels like a long time since Strand has had a conversation like this, no ulterior motives, nobody trying to test him or get something out of him.

“We should probably try and get you to sleep,” Strand says, when he wants to say yes. Alex’s face doesn’t quite mask a quick flash of defeat. It’s easy to forget how young she is when she’s not hunting for answers or trying to trap him in a half-truth. “You have a flight home tomorrow, don’t you?”

“At noon, yeah.” Alex rolls the pill bottle between her palms, the rattling soft in the silence. She spares a sideward glance towards the television before she sets the bottle down on the nightstand. “Could you just… find something on the TV? For the noise? I hate it when it’s too quiet.”

He knows why. It’s easy to hear floorboards creaking, to imagine the doorknob rattling. Healthy skepticism is rarely within easy reach at three in the morning.

Alex tosses him the remote and slips into the bathroom with her overnight bag. He pauses for a moment before taking a seat at the foot of the bed. Sometimes the boundaries between them are so shaky, so disparate at different times. This has been normal for them, he supposes. Being alone in hotel rooms across the Pacific coast together, yes--but always kept company by the constant debate, the push and pull between skepticism and critical belief. Her room is sparse as is, no table to sit at for the great and constant debate or room for Alex to pace.

He flips through the channels, not really absorbing the flashes of light, muted of sound for now.

She comes back out a few minutes later, her face scrubbed clean and her hair braided back from her face. The airport look of her is finally gone, hanging around only in the deep wrinkles in her clothes.

“Forgot to pack anything to sleep in,” she says, shrugging out of the cardigan. “Guess I didn’t figure I would manage much sleeping.”

“You should try,” he insists, and he can see her roll her eyes as she tugs the duvet back.

“I'm planning on it.”

She slides in, still in her jeans, and settles on her side. He flips past the news, a reality show, a re-run of a long-cancelled sitcom.

Alex laughs behind him, and when he looks back towards her she has her hands over her face, her eyes covered.

“Just pick something,” she groans. “I'm not going to watch it.”

“If I'm sitting vigil,” he says, “I should find something that won't bore me to sleep.”

She laughs again, quieter, and fumbles to turn the lights off with her other hand still pressed to her face. She misses by a long shot, and he leans across the bed to flip the switch himself.

They’re quiet for a long minute. The television’s running an infomercial for a food processor and Strand can’t decide if he should stay sitting at the foot of the bed or move. There’s nowhere else to sit, really.

“Richard?” Alex says, quiet for so long that her voice startles him a little.

“Yes?”

“Sing me a lullaby?”

She’s teasing, he can tell that tone of voice by now, but he laughs.

“I don’t think you’d like that,” Strand says, hesitates, and: “Charlie used to cry when I tried.”

“Really?” Alex says. “What’d you sing her?”

“Whatever I could remember enough of.” He shrugs. “Coralee was a better singer.”

She doesn’t respond, but after a moment her hand touches his knee, squeezes gently.

* * *

He’s woken up by a hand on his head. 

“Dr. Strand?”

Her voice is thick in the dark; she sounds half-asleep. 

“I’m here,” he says, sitting back up, and he can hear her exhalation, a soft, “Thank god,” that almost has him laughing until Alex rolls onto her side. He tries to stretch and his back aches from sleeping for so long, half-curled at the very edge of the bed.

The clock radio reads 3:09 a.m., and Alex is feeling for his hand with feverish fingers. She holds fast.

“I’m still awake,” Alex whispers. “I haven’t--I mean, I don’t think I’m dreaming.”

“You’re not,” he assures.

“That’s exactly what you’d say if I was,” she says, pulling his hand to her face. “I feel feverish.”

Her face is indeed hot to the touch, her neck warm under his palm.

“Are you alright?”

She hums in the back of her throat and holds his wrist. In the flickering light of the television he can see that she's kicked the covers off, kicked her _pants_ off, and her legs are sprawled bare across the covers.

“Sorry,” she mumbles. “Got hot. I had--must've slept because I had a dream.”

“A dream.” The intimacy is a shell shock; Alex's bare legs bump up against his elbow. “A nightmare?”

“Mm-mmn.” She shakes her head.

He's stuck looking at her, splayed out in the dark hotel room. Her hair is falling out of the braid, trailing over the pillow, and her shirt is twisted up past her navel.

“You-” Alex starts, but she trails off, letting her head fall back. Her eyes are half-shut but her gaze is steady, heavy, not quite focused but still searingly direct.

“I?”

“Strand,” Alex murmurs into his wrist. “Richard.”

She presses her mouth to his skin, feels for his pulse with her teeth. He doesn’t pull away, can’t move suddenly for the warmth of her tongue. Her fingers are clumsy and hot at the cuff of his shirt, unbuttoning it and shoving the sleeve up further.

He groans, and she echoes it, reaches with her other hand to grab his shirt and pull him down. Their foreheads touch, just short of pain. She’s burning up compared to him, face flushed and her breath fast. She hasn’t looked away. Her hand stays on his wrist, a hard cuff as she tilts her face towards him.

Alex kisses him.

It’s not gentle: she presses her mouth to his, closed and then opening on an exhale that leaves him breathless. She moves her hand to the back of his neck, scraping his scalp with short nails and running her fingers through his hair.

His hands--he can’t focus long enough to move them, one hand planted on the bed to hold himself up and the other hanging dumbly in the air.

She lets go of his wrist to take his glasses off, and he lays his palm on her side, the spot where her shirt rides up and her skin is flushed. Alex pulls him in closer, cranes her neck to reach his throat and softens her touch.

If she asks--there’s no hope for him if she asks--Strand will not say no. There’s no way he _could_ say no, he thinks, and it is thrilling to think that she might ask him. He is a godless heathen, has always been a godless heathen, and for close to twenty years he has been a tacitly celibate godless heathen. Alex doesn’t scare him, not like that.

Her hands urge him over her, tugging close so that he has to follow, has to turn and set a knee on the bed. Underneath him she shifts one thigh between his, pressing up against where he is hard and willing in a way he hasn’t been in years.

“God,” Alex moans when he slips a hand up under her shirt.

“God?” He says. It comes out weak, thready. Still condescending, somehow.

“Don’t you dare start in now,” she scolds. She grabs his wrist again, pulls his hand away from her breast and pushes it down. Between her legs. “Just--touch me already.”

Instead of moving her hand away immediately, back to his shoulder or his hair, Alex slips her fingers between his, cupping his hand as he cups her, drags his fingers upwards and back down again in a slow roll. Her hips jerk up into it, and, like she’s satisfied he gets the picture, she slides her hand back up his forearm just under the open cuff of his shirt. Strand’s skin is still wet where she kissed it, the shape of her teeth still so slightly imprinted in him.

“Better?” Strand asks. She draws her leg up, grinds her thigh against his cock, murmurs an insistent: “ _Yes_.”

He digs the tips of his fingers in and her nails on his skin echo electric. The nape of his neck, the inside of his elbow. They’re not going to last, not with Alex so insistent on cutting the brake lines. The tightrope is swaying in the wind, the scales have tipped, the Magic 8 Ball reports the outcome hazy.

Alex lifts her hips, squirms out of her underwear when he sits back on his heels to take them off of her. He barely gets them down her calves before she pulls him back in. She bites at his lip, licks into his mouth, drags her tongue against his, and when he draws his fingers back between her legs she pants another fast _yes_.

She’s wet, eager, spreading her legs further when he sinks two fingers knuckle-deep into her. Her mouth falls open and her head back. Strand wonders what her policy is on bruises. Wonders what Nic will say if she returns from Chicago with a deep red mark at the hollow of her throat.

He picks her shoulder instead. At the station she wears crew-neck t-shirts, and on interviews something nicer, and--and he likes the thought of her having a secret like this. One he knows.

Strand nips her skin, a test run, and Alex moans, tilts her head away, tenses around his fingers. He bites down and she hisses something obscene. Her fingers dig into his forearm, slip and scratch him when he fucks her harder. There’s no rhythm until he sets one and she agrees to it without words, her hand in his hair tensing and releasing in turn.

Her thighs are shaking when she pulls his mouth off her and kisses him again. Their teeth clack and he hears her swallow a whimper, exhale a soft moan. His shoulder has started to fatigue, a burning sensation in the bicep that makes him ache for his younger years again.

“Don’t stop,” she says, when the rhythm stutters. “Fuck, don’t-”

Alex’s face is cast in blue light. Her sentence falls off with a look like when she’s on the verge of epiphany, all focus and determination and a bit-lip struggle to get to where she needs to go.

He doesn’t stop. She digs her heels into the bed and presses up with her hips when Strand thrusts fast and shallow.

She swears again against his mouth, whispers, “Fuck, fuck, fuck _fuckfuck_ ,” before the breath rushes out of her lungs. Her body tenses up against him, shaking. Alex comes with a body-long shudder and a high moan. Her hand on his neck digs under his collar. He can feel the marks her nails leave beginning to burn even as she catches her breath beneath him.

His fingers still inside her, he thrusts long and slow, and she shivers.

“Give me a second,” she says. He moves his hand away, braces it on the bed to take some of his weight off the other aching wrist. “I can, again, just.”

When she opens her eyes, they’re clearer, more focused on him than before. Strand doesn’t break the silence, and she looks her fill, the moment playing out quiet after so long being loud. He knows his cheeks are flushed, doesn’t know how well she can see in the flickering glow. His shirt is rumpled but fastened, his slacks creased. She’s had her hands in his hair for what feels like an eternity. It’s probably sticking up everywhere.

Alex holds his gaze as she trails her fingers along the zipper of his pants. She’s strangely sober, methodical in undoing his belt with one hand and popping the button open.

It’s such a relief to have her touching him that his composure nearly breaks. He drops to his elbows above her, his head on her shoulder, almost embarrassed to find himself so pliant already. Alex stretches to shove his pants and briefs down, metal clinking quietly.

“Hey,” she says, and when he lifts his head to look at her she wraps her hand around his cock. “Breathe.”

He wants to laugh, to see her smile break when he does, but her palm is so warm, slick with sweat, that he can’t. It’s been so long, the last hours and the last twenty years combined. Strand leans in close to kiss her and she is gentler now. Her lips are slow and lingering, the tug of her hand steady. She’s better at holding the rhythm than him (a blessing of youth, he thinks) and he can picture her all too easily drawing this out a hundred different ways.

“Alex,” he murmurs.

She pecks her lips against his jaw. “Yes?”

“Please go faster.”

She does smile now, laughs a little even. “Well, since you asked so nicely.”

For a moment she teases, draws away and leaves just her fingertips tracing the length of his cock, hesitating at the head before trailing downwards, so light it almost tickles. But Alex cranes her neck to kiss him again and he can feel the urgency returning to it.

She’s teeth and tongue again, her hand a firm grip and the rhythm of her arm steady, twisting quick when he ruts against her. The want to fuck her is a sudden sharp pang, drawn out into detail when she rearranges without taking her hand off him. Alex hikes her leg up, scoots to the side so that he’s half-kneeling between her legs, propped up on elbows and luck.

He opens his eyes again to see her watching him, lower lip pinned between her teeth.

She’s thinking about it too. He can feel it. For a moment he thinks she’s going to ask--her mouth opens, her gaze drops between them, and he _wants_ \--but she doesn’t. Her eyes meet his again, and read him clearly.

“Next time,” Alex says, and he shudders, presses his lips to hers.

The thought of being inside her is swallowed in the hot rush down his spine, the realization that he is going to come and she is going to watch him. Avidly.

Alex doesn’t try to hide it, doesn’t shy from staring when his breathing gets ragged.

“Alex,” he says, half-groans it, and when he can’t think of what could follow her name he says it again. “Alex.”

Her eyes shine in the dark, flicking down to her hand on his cock moving faster yet and then back to his face. She leans up to kiss him again, and he closes his eyes. Her tongue traces his, the slowness almost maddening compared to how close he is to the edge, skirting orgasm the way a back doesn’t properly crack.

Strand kisses her hard and bruising and she makes a soft surprised noise in her throat, jumps against him, and he comes before he’s aware he’s going to. She lets go and leaves him thrusting against her soft stomach, grinding through his orgasm with a groan.

The tension drops and Alex holds fast, his heartbeat slowing under cotton and skin. Hers thrums against his cheek.

Her shoulder is warm, a little slick against his mouth and his breath. Alex cups the back of his neck and squeezes twice; she lets her hand slip further down. She traces the marks she left so softly that it translates as pure apology. She presses her lips to his hair, breathes out against him.

“If it helps,” she says, “I’m tired enough that I’m not even freaking out right now.”

He laughs--he has to. She does too.

“Alex,” Strand starts. She shushes him, and yawns into his ear.

“Sleep now, talk later.”

He can do that.

They rearrange--Alex slips out from under him, hunts down her underwear and goes into the bathroom for a moment. He fixes his pants while she can’t see his uncertainty (stripping down or staying clothed?) but keeps his cuffs unbuttoned. When she comes back out her hair is loose, face washed, shirt straightened, and he still hasn’t decided.

Alex double-checks her alarm, turns off the television, throws back the covers. She lies down on her stomach and he hesitates again, long enough that she turns onto her side to look up at him.

“Don’t overthink this,” she says. “I mean it, please. Just stay.”

He lies next to her, still in shirt and pants, and she smiles wide enough that he can see it in the dark, and knows she’s laughing at him. His fussiness, his lack of practicality in anything but being practical. She reaches out to touch his face.

“Take your damn pants off, Strand.”

“Alright,” he says.

But he leaves his shirt on.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this fic was 75% done before episode 2 came out and Strand's grief beard was revealed, soooo.... just pretend he stopped for a shave before the coffee.
> 
> Thanks.


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